Justin Hodges (280ZForce)

Recommended Posts

Here's an explanation of why Justin was asked to move his five vendor threads off of HybridZ and onto his own sales platform and why we banned him today.

The Admin staff of HybridZ has to manage the site for all the membership. When we start receiving e-mails and PMs with complaints about a specific member we discuss the complaints in our private Admin forums and work towards a solution that benefits the site and the membership. Traditionally we do not get involved in specific member-to-member sales transactions because the time and effort required to get some kind of resolution is of little benefit to the site and the membership at large.

In Justin's case we started receiving PMs from members in late February regarding non-delivery of product and items purchased from the Classifieds. The volume of these PMs was such (four private sale transactions and five group buy threads) that we felt we needed to get involved to keep a growing number of our members from losing significant amounts of money (as we all can see it grew into thousands of dollars).

Based on past practice, the HybridZ Admin staff would have banned Justin, deleted all his threads, and let the members work out repayment themselves. The "shoot first and ask questions later" method. In Justin's case we felt that the issues had grown too large for us to ignore.

Various Admins started getting involved in the vendor and classified transactions to apply pressure to Justin (and in some cases the other party) to resolve the disputes. This took a couple months and once we felt we had accomplished as much as we could with the issues that were brought to our attention we decided to give Justin notice that he has to move his business off of HybridZ onto his own web site. We felt 30 days was sufficient for him to contact all his customers and let them know what was going on with the sales.

On May 4th, 2009 we posted the notice in all Justin's Vendor threads which was about a week after we notified Justin privately. Today those threads are removed and Justin is no longer a member here. He has his own forum at: http://zforceproductions.com for those that want to continue to do business with him.

We have banned him from HybridZ directly as a result of the volume of complaints from his private classified sales and indirectly from his conduct as a vendor here. We have heard about all the issues he's had in his personal life and we hope he gets through all of that, but our concern is for the membership here as a whole.

HydridZ is administered by a bunch of volunteers who do this when we have time between family, day jobs, etc. Some have accused us during this time of being corrupt, vindictive, elitist, a "good 'ol boy" network, and a few other things. We're none of that but we can't change anyone's mind who feels that we are "The Man" and are crushing one of their good friends while he's down. These people need to remember that HybridZ is an Internet message board, nothing more.

We hope Justin succeeds in his business efforts and provides the Z community with another resource. Right now, actions speak louder then words and if he delivers on his promises and then wants back on HybridZ, he can contact us.